Culture

Sir Ian McKellen's Women's March sign is a top-notch friendship troll

While they are important showings of solidarity in retaliation to the threat of oppression, today's Women's Marches held in cities around the world have also been possibly the greatest display of sign-making skills and cheeky wit in recent memory.

It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the world's most treasured actors, Sir Ian McKellen, showed up to London's event with an absolutely top-notch sign that both extolled the fed up message of the day and trolled his good friend, Sir Patrick Stewart.

McKellen was spotted by a fan, who snapped a pic of him and posted it to Twitter. In a message shared on Twitter late Saturday, McKellen said the sign was not his own.

"I found it at the end of the March in Trafalgar Square," he wrote. "The Women and their allies had devised their own visual protests, hand-written and improvised at home, expressing their personal reaction to the new President."

Yep. It is. The sign is nothing but the now-ubiquitous Face Palm meme, which features a very fed-up Stewart in his Star Trek role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

McKellen and Stewart have a famously playful friendship, which, thankfully, has been well-documented for all to see online. This latest public jibe is a great reminder to everyone that if you're going to make a public statement, you might as well take a chance to make fun of your friends while you're doing it.

The Women's March in London was the longest I have been on. Unlike most demonstrations it was not commandeered by any one group with its identical posters.

The women and their allies had devised their own visual protests, hand-written and improvised at home, expressing their personal reaction to the new President, whose name in schoolyard English means "to break wind" appropriately.

The placard of Sir Patrick, by the way, was not my own — I found it at then end of the March in Trafalgar Square. But there were hundreds of others, including the other three here.

President Breaking Wind has impacted us all; and personally. Some like him, think they can identify with him, believe him because they've seen him on television perhaps and think the billionaire and his billionaire team are truly their friends. The rest of us, including the majority of voters in the USA, see through the charade: after all, the schtick is not exactly subtle. But he's riled us, got under our skin, asking us angry and despairing that he should have got through to the final of his show and turned democracy into a tv/twitter spectacular.

What will happen? No doubt his believers will soon be disillusioned. The rest of us cannot let him reign unchallenged. The Marches today were a good beginning. Some who fear him say "give the man a chance" OK — he's started by removing LGBTQ people, climate change and state funding of the arts from POTUS's website. He's had his chance.

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